Donating your heartbeat in the name of science and jazz

The human heart beat is being harnessed to provide a different kind of rhythm, in a unique project that links music to human health.

Transcript

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: The sound of the human heartbeat is literally the rhythm of life. Now that beat is being harnessed to provide a different kind of rhythm in a unique project that links music to human health. You may not have heard anything like it before, but as Rebecca Baillie found, it can be a life saver.

DEREK WILLIAMSON, MUSEUM OF HUMAN DISEASE, UNSW: It has this sort of hypnotic feel about it. ... Knowing our heart rate can help us understand kinda the processes that are happening in the body.

REBECCA BAILLIE, REPORTER: Derek Williamson's bearing all in the name of science. He's hooking up with a jazz band which is jamming to the real-life beat of the heart. These sounds will provide the foundation for a jazz concert with a difference, designed to highlight the dangers of heart disease.

DEREK WILLIAMSON: We wanted to help people engage with understanding their bodies, their hearts a little bit better and do it in a way that was probably a little bit off the beaten track.

REBECCA BAILLIE: Drummer Simon Barker usually generates the beat. This time though he's improvising to a human pulse.

SIMON BARKER, MUSICIAN: Yeah, it's lovely. I mean, again, it feels very normal because the heartbeat is such a natural rhythm. It's a perfect kind of sound and texture to build music on.

REBECCA BAILLIE: Would you say that all heartbeats sound the same?

SIMON BARKER: No, absolutely not. There are some that just sounded so comfortable. It was like, "Wow, that's beautiful to just listen to as it is."

DEREK WILLIAMSON: We can all kind of feel or hear or sense our own heartbeat's rhythm and we can change it according to what we're doing so, it's a little bit musical like that, but there's a whole lot of research that's kind of looking into the sounds that it makes as a way of diagnosing diseases as well.

REBECCA BAILLIE: This performance is more than just novel entertainment. It's also a proven life-saver.

At Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital, intern Dr Michael Chan treats people every day for life-threatening disease. But while still a medical student, Dr Chan's own life was saved after he volunteered to have his heart scanned for the jazz heartbeats project two years ago.

MICHAEL CHAN, INTERN, PRINCE OF WALES HOSPITAL: When it came to my turn generating the beats to the music, they managed to find a very rare benign tumour and they said, "Look, buddy, I think you've got a tumour in the heart and I think you should see a doctor very soon." It was a very serendipitous finding.

REBECCA BAILLIE: The next day, Michael Chan went to see cardiologist Dr Greg Cranny, now his colleague at Prince of Wales Hospital.

GREG CRANNY, CARDIOLOGIST: And this is his heart pumping. You can see the four chambers quite clearly. And here's this mass in the back of the heart with these fron-like structures with little bits and pieces that are just waiting to fly off. I bet you're glad that's out now.

MICHAEL CHAN: Very, very glad.

GREG CRANNY: Michael's a lucky guy. It just was completely fortuitous that he happened to volunteer to be the subject that night and had it done.

REBECCA BAILLIE: Dr Cranny confirmed that Michael Chan had a myxoma, a cardiac tumour. Within days, the young student was in open-heart surgery.

GREG CRANNY: It may not have been picked up for some years or it may have been picked up after he'd had a major event like a stroke.

MICHAEL CHAN: Who knows what would have happened. You know, sometimes these manifest as sort of instantaneous people sort of dropping and falling dead, otherwise, you know, it can lead to things like strokes as clots can be thrown off large masses that obstruct the flow.

REBECCA BAILLIE: Simon Barker was in the band when Michael Chan's tumour was found. While he doesn't expect someone's life to be saved every time he performs, he says there's no doubt music is healthy for both heart and soul.

SIMON BARKER: Music can actually change your physicality. For me, the way that music influences people, both on a physical level and an emotional level, is what we do it for.

MICHAEL CHAN: It probably saved my life and I'm very grateful for the life that I have after this.